


the other one was to survive

by Anna_Blume



Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Explicit Language, F/M, s3e6, season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:40:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27838507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna_Blume/pseuds/Anna_Blume
Summary: "If he left this room now, there would be nothing lying ahead of him. To exit this room would mean to enter the void once more. The memory of it… the possibility of it… it made him want to vomit right there on the floor."June confronts Nick about his past.
Relationships: Nick Blaine/June Osborne | Offred
Comments: 2
Kudos: 32





	the other one was to survive

**Author's Note:**

> My little take on Nick and June’s attempt to clear the air after Serena's "reveal" in S3E6. 
> 
> This one-shot was inspired by season 4 trailer and by the scrip notes, especially from season 3. I appreciate them and the ladies who got them greatly!
> 
> I'm a non-native speaker, so please forgive any mistakes you will (most definitely) encounter.

Behind the thick fog, the late afternoon sun seemed to be barely there. The air the color of an old rag aided Nick’s hideout but in turn, made it almost impossible for him to see into the yard behind the barn. He was relatively warm, bundled up in layers of clothing under the heavy-duty parka, but his toes were freezing in the steel noses of the field boots. In fact, his feet were so cold, he was seriously considering pulling the shoes off and shoving his feet into the sleeves of his jacket. He moved his ankles and toes to enforce the blood flow, which hit his feet as if with a thousand needles. _Fucking fuck_ , he cursed under his breath, the words leaving his mouth inside a white cloud.  


In the distance, a faint creak sounded, turning his focus back towards the yard. He froze and strained his eyes, trying to identify the silhouette that appeared a moment later. Friend or foe? A woman or a man? A Handmaid or a Guardian?  


It was definitely a woman – a long gray skirt dragging around her ankles, a knit beret pulled down over her ears, a large cardigan wrapped tightly around her body. She flitted across the yard to the back of the main building, up the steps there, and disappeared behind the wooden door.  


He sat still, waiting. He couldn’t be sure it was her - the woman was too fast and too bundled-up herself to give away anything distinctive. He moved his toes around again, the darkness slowly falling around him.  


After a long moment, the door opened again, casting bright light into the milky twilight. The same woman moved down the stairs, a large basket on her hip. It looked heavy and she moved slowly now across the barren, brown ground. She stopped half way between the main house and the barn, and put the basked down. It was an effort for her to straighten up again, her hand clutching at her back. She mumbled something and in the almost complete silence surrounding them, her voice miraculously carried to him. _Jesus fuck_ , it said.  


A smile broke across Nick’s face, he couldn’t stop it. Something that felt like a balloon filled with hot water broke inside his chest. It pooled in his stomach, in his groin, and down to his legs and the frozen toes. His vision blurred as he watched her pick up the basket and disappear behind the door of the barn. When he moved from his crouching position, his feet screamed with pain and he was starting to tremble inside, but the latter wasn’t from the cold.  


He moved to the bushes far beyond the barn, circumventing it, and approached it from the opposite side. There was a Guardian assigned to the grounds, Nick saw him check the property only once during the two hours he’s been hiding. It was possible he would appear again any minute, so Nick kept a close lookout. He crept carefully along the wooden wall of the barn, then around the corner and to the door, which he managed to open without it creaking.  


In the pitch-black vestibule, he crouched again, listening. The space behind the heavy curtain was as still as the air outside. He moved to it and peeked through the crack. There was a large open floor to the left with numerous bunk beds and a large table in the middle, where he couldn’t spot a soul, and a hallway straight ahead, where a faint sound of movement caught his attention.  


Trying to will his heart to slow down, he moved down the corridor to a kitchen tucked away at the end, where the same woman, now with the cardigan off and the sleeves of her gray sweatshirt rolled up her forearms, stood by the counter, her back to him. She reached for a potato from the heap in the basket.  


“I have a knife,” she said almost casually, but Nick could see her body stiffen nonetheless.  


“June.” It was all he could manage to get out. To move his lips and tongue and diaphragm to create this sound again… His chest tightened with exhilaration.  


Her gasp was barely audible and he thought the knife had fallen from her hand when he heard a clink of metal, but her palm was still on the handle, and he realized she’d slammed it on the counter. Slowly, she turned around.  


The contrast in her expression to the one she gave him the last time he saw her, almost four months earlier, in the snowy back yard of the Winslow house, made his blood stop cold in his veins.  


“What are you doing here?” she whispered, a similar frost creaking in her voice as in her eyes.  


He scoffed, blinking in confusion. “I’m on leave.”  


“How did you know I was here?”  


“Mayday. The driver.”  


She held his gaze and the coldness in her eyes seemed to melt a little. He kept his eyes on hers as if in a staring match. He didn’t want it to stop, ever. A tear rolled down her cheek but she didn’t move, still tense with the knife in her hand.  


“You okay?” he took a step forward and this time, the knife did fall, making June flinch and break eye contact. She picked it up and turned her back to him, reached for another potato, and it felt as though she punched him right in his gut. Still, he moved towards her, peeling off his hat and gloves, the layers of clothes now making him too warm. He stepped right behind her, the smell of her hair strong even through the knitted fabric of her hat. “June, what’s wrong?” he whispered.  


She stopped peeling the potato and just stood there. He could hear her breathe laboriously. He could barely keep himself from touching her.  


“Why did you join?” she said finally.  


Just like that, everything crumbled away. The ground was made of straw, rickety and yielding under his weight. All his thoughts, all his hopes and dreams, of what they could be - the bold ones, like Maui, and the modest ones, like to hold her again - collapsed into themselves like a house of cards. This was it. The coldness that just started to leave his body returned, crept even deeper into his bones.  


He turned on his heel - the closeness to her too much all of a sudden - and moved to the table, which stood pushed against the wall. He dropped his hat and gloves there and then leaned against it on his hands.  


“How?”  


“Doesn’t matter,” she offered quickly in clipped voice.  


He turned around, folding his arms, leaning back against the edge of the bare wood. When the silence grew almost unbearable, she finally turned to look at him.  


“I never shared their beliefs,” he said, holding her gaze. “I thought I made that clear.”  


“That wasn’t my question.”  


“Was it Serena?”  


“Nick,” she breathed and he understood she wasn’t angry. She felt betrayed. Which was so much worse. “Were you there? The Capitol?”  


He unfolded his arms, held on to the edge of the table. “Yes.”  


June squeezed her eyes shut as if _he_ punched her in the gut. “Were you one of the shooters?”  


He took a shaky breath. He could either hurt her with the truth or hurt her with his silence. He didn’t want to hurt her at all, but that option was not on the table anymore.  


“Either tell me or leave,” she whimpered.  


If he left this room now, there would be nothing lying ahead of him. To exit this room would mean to enter the void once more. The memory of it… the possibility of it… it made him want to vomit right there on the floor.  


“Another soldier and I were guarding a staircase at the back of the building,” he said, shuffling his feet on the ground, where he fixed his eyes, too. “They didn’t tell us anything until that morning. Even then, they told us they wanted to _force_ people out.”  


“Did you kill anybody?”  


“I shot a Capitol guard. He surprised us, came at us, opened fire. He got my partner in the throat. I pulled the trigger before I could think.”  


The image resurfaced then, the bright red fountain exploding from the throat; the utter bafflement in the boy’s eyes and his hand clasping over the wound; the instant, coppery smell of hot blood that filled the air. Then the guard, stopped in his tracks by Nick’s bullet cracking his skull, toppling backwards onto the marble floor with an oily smack. Then silence.  


“Who else?”  


Nick exhaled, dared to look at her again. “No one.”  


“Why should I believe you?” she asked, frowning. There were reasons she should. He hoped she would. He feared she wouldn’t. “Why did you join?” she repeated.  


“You know why,” he answered, his voice breaking unexpectedly on the _why_. There was a moment before she blinked, sighed, looked down at her feet. “He practically raised me. I couldn’t _not_ do everything to help him, to keep him alive.” Nick looked away, his eyes stinging with hot tears. “Without my steady income… They would’ve thrown him out and he needed to stay. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.” He looked at his hands where his thumb has already rubbed a bright red spot into the palm of the other hand. “I just wanted him healthy.”  


The last memory of Josh, which Nick stored away in a painfully swollen place in his mind, came to life. The shore, the smell of the lake, the end-of-summer chill in the air. His brother, tired and skinny, drowning in his sweatshirt, finally talking about his future, his face pinkish in the light of the setting sun. His brother, who’d proclaimed his undying love for the bottom of the whisky bottle and the kick from the needle in his arm, talking about the long road that lay ahead of him. His brother, recognizing what broke him. His brother, finally willing to fight. His brother, finally seeing his own worth.  


“Why didn’t you run? After?” she asked, softer now.  


Nick couldn’t tell if she meant after Josh’s death or after the coup, but it didn’t matter. The answer was the same.  


“I was responsible. I _am_ responsible,” he hushed, his chest deflating. He left Josh in that facility to fight alone. By earning money for the treatment, he made _all this_ possible. “I let Gilead swallow me whole because I thought I could cut it open from the inside somehow. But what I hadn’t realized was that it started to digest me, too. I became numb, detached, until... until _you_.” He looked at her again, her eyes watery blues.  


“Why didn’t you tell me, Nick? We’ve talked about it at the Globe. You could have told me then.”  


“You never asked.”  


“Are you serious?”  


“You suspected it, but you didn’t ask,” he repeated when June looked away, blinking away fresh tears. “You didn’t want to know. You were halfway back to your husband and you didn’t want to know.” Her jaw was set, telling him he was right.  


“I suspected you were pulled into SoJ. I didn’t suspect you were part of the coup.”  


Nick watched the tendon in her jaw pulse under the skin of her cheek, he watched her fight the tears that wouldn’t stop coming. He wanted to unzip himself and shed all the ambiguity like the parka he was wearing, make himself clear and see-through, so that she understood. So that there was no doubt left. He wanted to walk over to her and take her hand, remind her of who he was. Who she helped him become.  


“I was ashamed, June. It’s my biggest mistake and it just sits there in the middle of my life like a fucking boulder that I can’t move. It’s a fact I cannot change. Nothing I can ever do will make it disappear. But what I could do, though… I could protect the one thing I did right.”  


“Fuck you with your holier-than-thou hero savior bullshit,” she hissed through clenched teeth, knocking the wind out of him. “You want a crown of thorns, too?” she added, a tone of mockery in her voice, her eyebrows raised in a similar manner when she turned to him.  


“I would give it right back to you,” he retorted.  


“The fuck that’s supposed to mean?”  


“You, getting those children out? Playing Moses to their fucking Exodus?” His heart was hammering in his chest as June stared at him, silent and baffled. “Didn’t you put your life on the line to save them? Didn’t you risk never finding Hannah for that?”  


“That was different,” she snapped, shaking her head, balling her hands into fists. “They didn’t deserve this. I _had_ to do something. I _had_ to help.”  


“No, June, it’s not different,” he said, his voice more leveled now. “It’s exactly the same.” She cocked her chin and turned away from him, her hands spread flat on the counter. “I need to get this thing off,” Nick mumbled, unzipping his jacket, which by then made drops of sweat roll down his back, and threw it on the table next to him. As he stood there, unsure of what to do next, he watched her back move under her sweatshirt in tandem with her breathing as it slowed down. He wanted so badly to go to her and put his hand on her rib cage, _feel_ her breathe.  


“I shot a Guardian,” June whispered then. “We were almost on the airfield when the patrol came out of nowhere. We tried to divert their attention so that Rita could lead the kids to the plane,“ she continued, her voice growing steadier as he listened, dumbfounded. “When that didn’t work, I made the Guardian follow me, chase me through the woods, away from the kids. I had a gun with me and after he got me, he was about to call for back-up…” she stammered and looked up at the wooden beams of the ceiling. “I shot him right in the face, Nick.”  


“June,” he whispered, imagining her anguish as waves of shock rolled through him, turning his fingers cold again. What horrified him was not the fact that she was able to do it, but that she had to, that this godforsaken place didn’t leave her any other choice. That it kept leaving her no choice.  


“Don’t,” she said firmly. “I had time to make my peace with it. For now, at least. But that’s not all.” She took a deep breath before she turned around, her face pale but calm and composed. “Commander Winslow.”  


He looked at her, confused. When the realization hit him, he had to lean back against the table to steady himself. The mere idea of her having to go through _that_ again made what little he had to eat that day rise in his throat. “Did he uhm, did he,” Nick stuttered, suddenly unable to form that word in his mouth. “What did he do?” he asked instead.  


He felt himself sink deeper into his own body, where only bits of her account reached him as she spoke. “He tried to... I fought... shocked by his strength... The force of his blows... kill me... It was like an electrical short.... I stabbed him with his pen, couldn’t stop.”  


“Where was that?” Nick asked, gasping for air and grasping for facts to keep himself from punching his fist through the table, even when he felt a shadow of relief that the motherfucker hadn’t hurt her that way. That June had been able to stop him.  


“Jezebels,” June answered, calmly now. “I went there to talk to the bartender about the plane. Winslow found me there and dragged me to his room.”  


“What happened afterwards?” Something cold grabbed at Nick’s heart and squeezed. "What happened to the body?”  


“I don’t know. I left him there… There was a Martha, I think. Maybe Lawrence had taken care of it, or maybe it was the Martha, I don’t know. Have you heard something?”  


“Only that he’s missing. Suspected to have been captured together with the Waterfords.”  


“And what about them?”  


“They’re in custody.”  


“What if the arrest is a hoax? What if Serena makes a deal? Don’t you think that’s the reason they went there in the first place?”  


“She won’t make a deal. Not about Holly.”  


“How do you know?”  


“I know.”  


“Nick,” June insisted.  


“I told them about Serena’s… _arrangement_. It’s coercion and sexual violence. A crime against humanity, punishable by the ICC. They might make some other deal with her. But they’re not giving her our daughter.”  


“You talked to the Swiss?” June asked, taken aback.  


“I did.”  


“But they said... they made you sound worse than Fred. And Serena… she said you were compliant, a Crusader. A true Gilead hero.”  


“That’s what she does. She lies and obfuscates in order to manipulate. Fuck her.”  


June scoffed, shaking her head. “Well then fuck me, too.”  


“What?”  


“Well, look at _me_... I lie, too, and I manipulate, and I bully... and I have blood on my hands.”  


“That’s not right, June, and you know it,” Nick said firmly, fighting the urge to get up and go to her. “You’re not like her and you’re not responsible for any of it. She chose to act the way she did. You had no choice.”  


“Didn’t I? Really?”  


“No, you didn’t,” he reassured, consciously ignoring her self-deprecating tone. “Survival is not really a choice when you’re dealing with an abuser, even if it means you have to lie and manipulate.”  


“She didn’t kill anybody.”  


“It was self-defense.”  


“Not the Guardian.”  


“You said it yourself - you had to help. _That_ was a choice but you couldn’t have known it would lead to that. Think of how many lives you’ve saved.”  


June looked into his eyes, her lips trembling. The moment stretched and he felt like the tension, the coldness in her, was slowly, very slowly, leaving her body. She bobbed her head, looking down at her fidgeting hands, chewing the inside of her cheek.  


“Well I guess you’re right, then. We’re not that different after all,“ she said quietly before she faced him again, all defenses down, as he searched her eyes for a clue of what she meant. “The one thing, SoJ… it was because you had to help. The other one was to survive.”  


Nick looked away abruptly, struck speechless as his body twitched involuntarily, just once, before he managed to control what caused it. He crossed his arms in front of him, as if to defend himself from her words, as if to smother the sudden bolt of hot, paralyzing hope that shot through him. Because that couldn’t be true - that she was accepting what he’d done.  


But there she was, whispering his name in that shaky voice, walking over to him, slowly resting her hand on his chest, patting him gently over the thick knit of his sweater. Then, a push under his chin, and there were her eyes, sharp and clear now, seeing through all his layers. He didn’t need to shed anything - she could do it all on her own.  


June tilted her head to the side, a warm smile spreading across her face. She finally looked like herself, like the picture of her he carried in his mind. She cupped his face, held his head steady in her palms, not letting him look away again. Her thumbs traced his cheekbones and skimmed over his lips. He kissed the pad of one thumb, flicking the tip of his tongue over it, but had to scrunch his face when he tasted the starchy bitterness there.  


“Oy, potato,” he chuckled.  


June burst with deep, dorky laughter, and he couldn’t believe how much he loved it and how much he loved her. He couldn’t believe that she stood there still, knowing what she did, and laughed with him - a stitch that held his world together.  


“Oy?” she said, just barely containing her delight.  


“I couldn’t say _yuck_ now, could I?”  


“Sure you could.”  


“Okay. Yuck,” he smirked.  


She kissed him then and her tenderness filled him with a different kind of warmth. It spread through him like honey when the tip of her tongue skimmed over his bottom lip, when it slipped inside his mouth, covering his tongue with her sweetness that he could taste at the base of his spine as well.  


“Better?” she whispered, resting her forehead against his.  


“You have no idea,” he hushed, grabbing her sweatshirt and pulling her closer. She slipped her arms around his neck as he gathered her to him, pushing his face into the crook of her shoulder.  


“June,” he murmured, seizing the opportunity to finally do what he came here to do, to finally say what he needed her to know.  


“Yeah?” she breathed into his hair.  


“I found Hannah."


End file.
